Chapter 12: Two Women in Blue

The Minneapolis Club ballroom had a chandelier the size of a small car.

Three hundred people in black tie stood under it with champagne, pretending not to look at the staircase.

I stood at the top of it in a pale blue gown that had belonged to a girl in 1974.

It had a high neck, a low back, and a skirt that moved.

Greta had taken it in at the waist herself, with her own hands, over three evenings, humming.

Under it I was wearing my steel-toe boots.

"Nobody will see them," Greta had said, pinning my hem. "And if they do, they'll think you're eccentric, which is what the rich are for."

She stood at my elbow now with her brass-loon cane, in a navy dress and a rope of pearls.

She looked as pleased as a cat at a fish market.

Anders waited a few steps below us at the head of the receiving line.

He wore a black tuxedo and a dove-grey silk tie.

Every few seconds his gaze came up the stairs to me, quick and hot, and went away again.

Three hundred people had read the Club's page.

They had seen the photo of the kiss.

They were waiting to meet the mystery wife.

"Remember," he'd said to me in the car, very low. "Whatever she does. You don't speak first."

"I'm a mechanic. I know how to wait for a part to arrive."

"The part is arriving at nine."

It was five minutes to nine.

The band stopped.

The master of ceremonies, a silver-haired man with a voice for radio, stepped up to the microphone on its stand.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said. "The Engdahl family welcomes you to the sixty-first annual Regatta Ball."

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